Brandy Is a Travel Advisor Now
Hanging out at Cabo San Lucas
Sarah went to London for work. A day and a half of meetings, and then the good decision: instead of flying home when the meetings ended, she stayed three more days.
Which left her with 72 hours in a city she didn't know, and no idea how to spend them.
So she called us, and we asked the question we always ask first, which is what do you actually want out of this. The answer came back fast. Harry Potter. All of it.
That's the easy part. The hard part is that London will happily let you spend all three days sprinting between things and go home exhausted, having enjoyed none of it. We've watched people do it, and we've done it ourselves.
So we built her a schedule. Tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The Warner Bros. Studio Tour, which is the one that actually delivers if you care about the films. A day out to Oxford and the filming sites: the Bodleian, Christ Church, New College, and of course, Turf Tavern where the crew would hang out after a day of filming. And because you don't go to London for the first time and skip London, we worked in Big Ben, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, and a boat down the Thames.
The work wasn't finding things for her to do. There were too many. The work was deciding what to leave out so she'd come home rested instead of wrecked.
Here's the thing, though. We could plan every hour of that trip. What we couldn't do was book a single piece of it.
But that has now changed because Brandy is officially a travel advisor now.
What it costs you
Nothing extra, and this is the part to celebrate.
Hotels, cruise lines, and tour operators pay advisors a commission on what gets booked. It comes out of their side, not yours. The rate you pay is the rate you'd have found yourself at eleven at night with fourteen tabs open and a growing suspicion you're missing a better deal somewhere.
What we're already seeing
We've been using this on our own travel since Brandy got set up, which is the only reason we're comfortable telling you about it. The kinds of things that have come through so far:
Better rates on hotels than what was showing publicly
Breakfast included
Room upgrades at check-in
Early check-in and late checkout, which matters more than people think when you land at seven in the morning
Free or reduced parking at a few places
Discounts and upgrades on cruises, and on international flights when you're up front
Not every property, and not every time. Any advisor who promises you a guaranteed upgrade is selling you something. But it happens often enough that it's changed how we book our own trips, and it costs you nothing to have someone in your corner asking.
Who Brandy works with
Brandy is an advisor with Fora, and the short version of why that matters is scale. Fora works with a lot of hotels, cruise lines, and tour operators, and those relationships are where the upgrades and the credits and the better rates come from. One person calling a hotel in Florence doesn't get much. An agency that sends them business all year does.
What doesn't change
We're going to keep telling you the Bahamas ports are our least favorite.
That's not a hypothetical. There will be commission on those bookings and there will be promotions attached to them, and we're still going to say it, because the day this site starts recommending places based on what pays is the day it stops being worth reading. If we didn't like it, you'll hear that we didn't like it.
And yes, we still do itineraries
The planning side isn't going anywhere. If you want a trip mapped out the way we did Sarah's, that's still on the table, and if you book the trip through us, there's a discount on the planning. We're still working out exactly how that shakes out, and the website is getting rebuilt to lay it all out properly.
For now, if there's a trip you've been circling for a while, email us at info@echoesofadventures.com. More ways to reach us are coming. Email is the best one today.
Sarah had 72 hours and a list she couldn't sort out. Most people have more time than that and the same problem.